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Brain candy for Happy MutantsTue, 31 Mar 2015 20:44:12 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Great Graphic Novels: From Inside, by John Berginhttp://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/great-graphic-novels-from.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/great-graphic-novels-from.html#commentsThu, 27 Sep 2012 16:30:03 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=183012Last month I asked my friends to write about books they loved (you can read all the essays here).]]>Last month I asked my friends to write about books they loved (you can read all the essays here). This month, I invited them to write about their favorite graphic novels, and they selected some excellent titles. I hope you enjoy them! (Read all the Great Graphic Novel essays here.) -- Mark

From Inside, by John Bergin

I am walking down a tunnel. No, it's the stairwell, the former stairwell. Its skeleton juts with unjoined charcoal ribs. I usually stay upstairs in the place where we used to lie next to each other and breathe.

Something important drew me down here. I remembered that sometime a message had come from Mark Frauenfelder, from Boing Boing. He wanted me to write about a graphic novel. The details elude me, the memory floats like a tiny grey cloud on the parched desert of my mind. I need a deluge. I have learned, though, to subsist on dew. There is no way to check email any more.

I push a pile of blackened books around with my burnt Docs, afraid to reach in with my hands. I don't remember when the fire happened. Maybe it is still happening.

The scorched tomes stir: Joel Peter Witkin's collection of Victorian death portraits, the title dissolved into the plasticky gloss of the book's cover. Marianne Wiggins' John Dollar, its spine worn off years ago. Jane Austen. Richard Kadrey. Colette. James Joyce. Edward Eager. Rumi. Susan Cooper. Lidia Yuknavitch. George Saunders.

George Saunders! I laugh, picturing the goats in Pastoralia and to laugh is such a good thing, I fish out the book with my hand. The book doesn't burn me. It simply disintegrates.

I resume kicking. Techgnosis. Skating Shoes. A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The midnight ephemeris of the 20th century. Twenty-three Lonely Planet guidebooks. Clown Girl. The Chicago Manual of Style. Touched with Fire. A little 'zine called Going Gaga. Four thesauri and the OED.

I reach the bottom of the pile in an hour.

I am ashamed. There are no graphic novels, only the dull white ruins of what must have once been the floor of our house. Did we really have a white floor? I cannot remember, exactly, what our home was like but I know these books followed me from apartment to apartment for decades, until I settled here. Until we settled here together. I and he.

My husband.

A temblor rustles through Southeast Portland. The floor groans and tilts, a gentle see-saw on a dusk-lit playground. The splintery floorboard remnants slide into a heap, where I see they are not floorboard remnants at all. I nudge them with my toe. They clatter in a particular way. Ah. Yes. I remember now. This room was full of people, laughing, hugging, wearing hats, drinking Champagne, singing a song about an old acquaintance we'd forgot. Now it is full of bones.

A book is entangled among them, its glossy paperback cover blistered. This time I put on my leather gloves before reaching in. The bones slide from its cover like the scales of a snake. From Inside, the cover reads, "John Bergin."

The pages unfurl beneath my fingers and I am turning, turning, turning the pages, swimming through images I have not seen in many years. The train, the lake, the floating dolls. The crow, the embryo, the mouse. The creepy nurse.

The baby. The girl's baby and the girl herself, the mounding of her belly, the depth of her fear. I didn't truly know that fear twenty years ago, reading the book for the first time. Now I know. It is one of the things I can still remember.

Wetness muddles the paper and I look up, my body aching toward the rain. But nothing is leaking through the hole in the roof above the collapsed second floor. It is dry and serene and oblivious to my thirst. I turn back to the book and lick the book's pages. Salt. A thin, salty trickle splashing down in slow, small drops. It seems so familiar -- a substance I must have come across a lot, before the fire. I don't remember its name.

I don't remember when the fire happened. Maybe it has always been happening.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/great-graphic-novels-from.html/feed1Mind Blowing Movies: Brazil, by Tiffany Lee Brownhttp://boingboing.net/2012/06/10/mind-blowing-movies-brazil-b.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/10/mind-blowing-movies-brazil-b.html#commentsMon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:41 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=165611This week, Boing Boing is presenting a series of essays about movies that have had a profound effect on our invited essayists.]]>This week, Boing Boing is presenting a series of essays about movies that have had a profound effect on our invited essayists. See all the essays in the Mind Blowing Movies series here. -- Mark

The Other Side: Brazil, by Tiffany Lee Brown

Warning: Spoiler alert!

[Video Link] When I told Boing Boing a few weeks back that I'd write this piece, I hadn't yet sat by my husband's side in the Trauma ICU, wondering whether his mind would stay in the far-off realms of the Other Side, like Sam in the movie Brazil, or whether he would come back to me. Josh was here in this world when I first saw him after his bicycle accident, a duct-like breathing tube emerging from his mouth. His right eye could just barely open, and through it he saw me and our son Gusty. I could tell he knew we were here. I knew he was here. I just knew.

At the end of Brazil, Michael Palin tortures Sam (Jonathan Pryce) from behind a spectacularly disturbing mask until Robert DeNiro's inimitable terrorist plumber, Tuttle, swoops in with his fellow revolutionaries and rescues Sam. Strange shenanigans follow, and Sam even gets to blow up the hideous, Kafkaesque Ministry of Information buildings. He's then swept away by the object of his romantic obsession, a truck drivin' tough gal, to live in the country in a caravan, complete with goats.

Except that Sam's living all these rescues in his mind. The final scene shows him staring out from his far-off mind while an evil overlord remarks, "Jack, I think he got away from us." Sam is gone. He hums the familiar tune: "Braziiiiiil, dah dah du du da da du daaaah..." and we cut back to our own realities, shaken and stirred.

Later on the day of the accident, Josh went away. I knew he wasn't here. I just knew. Then came the CT scan results: as his brain swelled inside his skull, it was bleeding more. I didn't know if he was ever coming back. I whispered in his ear that he was actually in a hammock at the remote beach in Oaxaca where we like to go. Maybe I appeared to Josh the way the truck driver appears to Sam in his dreams: sexy and feminine, calling "Saaam! Saaam!" from behind a rippling veil that separates realities. Only, yeah, I wouldn't be calling him Sam. That would be confusing. Jooosh, Jooosh, you're sleeping, you can hear the ocean, the sand is radiating heat up toward your skin. We have no goats, but a cool breeze floats by and a palapa keeps the sun off your skin. You're sleeping like you never get to sleep, like you always want to. Come back when you're ready. But make sure you come back.

Within days he was squeezing our hands to communicate and at some point engaged his brother in a thumb-wrestling match, complete with the cheater move he always used to pull when they were kids. He was definitely back. Unable to eat or talk or walk or stay conscious for very long, but back.

Meanwhile, I dropped into a zone of retrofuturistic, paperwork-laden, yes indeed Kafkaesque nonsense, the hospitals' and insurance companies' own scattered Ministries of Information. Time stops, then weasels, then shimmies, then stops again, when you're sitting in a hospital. The big cement buildings are bewildering to navigate, like poorly designed airports. There is no time or place. There is just waiting.

As he emerges from some Other Side, Josh goes through realms and experiences that can't be corroborated by consensus reality. Memory and time are malleable, spotty, chaotic -- just like everyone experiences, only since our frontal lobes aren't injured, we have mechanisms in place to reassure us that it all makes sense (whether or not it does). Fantasy and reality dive in and out of each other's peripheries like darting swallows in flight. In everyday life, we attempt to separate the two. Sam Lowry lets them play off each other. Now my husband does, too.

The final scene of Brazil always leaves me stunned and dry-mouthed, no matter how many times I've watched it. I am Sam. I lunge at the Powers That Be, ridiculous incompetent Powers that nevertheless hold my life in their grip; I imagine a better way of living and surviving, not just for me but for all of us; I fail. When I met my husband twelve years ago he inspired me to think that maybe one could be a semi-adult and still be pretty damned cool. Accept some given circumstances, dance with the Powers That Be, pull a Robin Hood on 'em. Become competent in their irritating reality and use that competence to make tiny, subversive, incremental changes in the world while building yourself a better life.

That's what I'm gonna do now, man up and be the competent grownup who can keep my family going. Maybe we'll all end up in a trailer with a goat and a big truck. Maybe I'll push papers at the Ministry of Information until finally they swirl around, plaster themselves to my grey flannel suit, and consume my body. The only thing I know for sure: someday we will cross to the Other Side and never come back.

(My awesome husband, incidentally, is Joshua Berger of PLAZM magazine, known to many of you over the years. Keep up with Josh, help out, post a photo of him, whatever, at Get Well Josh.)

Someday I hope to share with you audio from an interview I conducted with Mr. Wilson, but it's entirely possible the old cassette is long gone. I'm still looking. For now, here's text:

Robert Anton Wilson was kinda more George Carlin and less Timothy Leary than he sometimes appeared. I didn't know him truly, madly, deeply and we did not eat, pray, and love together. (OK, we did eat together, now that I think of it.) I did get to hang out with him a number of times.

What surprised me most was his practicality. Bob didn't actually strike me as being all that far-out; rather, he seemed a practical guy with a very smart mind and a very wacky sense of humor. Turning on was fun, sure, and led to important and far-reaching discoveries, some directed inward, others outward. Tuning in was essential: homing in on what matters and communicating to the tribe and also, importantly, to the potential tribe, to the yahoos who hadn't gotten all enlightened 'n' shit, the people who might really *need* to have their minds blown.

But he didn't think that dropping out was an option. He was solid in the pre-old-school sense. Solidly built in physicality, solidly convinced of the efficacy of his ideas, and despite his curmudgeonly tendencies, solidly committed to making the world a better place -- or at least showing its denizens some potential for doing it themselves. Sometimes, that's exactly what we need.

As I slither down the steep slope of early middle age toward doom, I take inspiration from the older people I've known. Hyper-idealist, impractical stuff loses it appeal (other than watching adorable youngsters engage in it). Guess I've done too many oh-so-important actions and interventions and protests that simply had no effect on anything. Guess I've seen, in my dotage, how much can get done by cruising along *inside* The System and subverting elements from within, gently influencing minds and systems rather than yelling at them from behind a kerchief mask.

When I met Bob, I was the angsty and eager young gal with the shaved head and the big boots, hoping he'd tell me how to burn the whole fuckin' universe to the ground so we could start over. He was the old dude talking about how you have to be on target with regular ol' reality in order to step up and make change. It's fine to question all the realities you can find, but you still have to eat something and take a piss and sit down on a chair that you have to trust is actually a chair. And I was able to hear him. He was looking at a longer scale and more realistic form of change than I wanted to entertain. I had enough sense to admire and respect that.

At first it might've been a little disappointing, to meet Bob and find out that he wasn't a far-out, wild-haired cross between Timothy Leary, Albert Einstein, Angela Davis, Tom Waits, Philip K. Dick, William Blake, and I dunno, Jimmy Hoffa? Bob seemed more like Trickster Santa.

He'd lived near where I lived in Ireland, both of us temporarily (and at the same time as each other at one point: weird). He talked about this move not as a romantic writerly escape to the ol' homeland but as a strategy for jacking the IRS. I barely even knew anybody who owned a house, like the one where I'd visited him and Arlen, much less talked about taxes. Except maybe my dad.

This is the sort of thing that has a real impact on a young person who will eventually, tardily, morph into a grownup. I needed to see that you could be shrewd about real life and its money bullshit, outspoken about bluntly political issues, and still be the coolest guy on the planet. That stuck with me. It stuck with me even when he approached his deathbed without the financial resources to do the whole thing elegantly and comfortably. He wasn't *that* much of a straight, square, buttoned down, financially stable normie!

But there are different kinds of stability, of solidity. Of solidarity, too. People all over the world and the Internet stepped up to donate thousands of dollars. We loved him and we wanted to help. We wanted to help the guy who turned on and tuned in but never dropped out. We cheered for the man who never quit, never took the easy and glamorous route of hollering for the counterculture's cliched version of revolution. Robert Anton Wilson embodied revolution -- a revolution of mind.